The football fan’s dysphoria: new paper on football clubs supports prediction about power of rituals

How can the Seshat: Global History Databank be used to make policy recommendations for modern times? By examining key aspects of societies in the past, we can better understand the factors that lead to political turbulence, war, and the collapse of empires. Ritual is one of these key aspects.

Rituals can be dysphoric, euphoric, or a combination of both. A dysphoric ritual is painful or frightening- from the human sacrifices of the Inca Empire to modern day hazing at fraternities. Euphoric rituals are joyful and celebratory, and include feasts and festivals. Rituals are held at all levels of a polity, from collective statewide rituals to rituals of small groups like soldiers or religious cults.

One important theory about rituals that has been proposed is that dysphoric rituals produce more tribal warfare, intra-elite conflicts, rebellions, and military revolts. This is one of the central predictions about the relationship between ritual and warfare that we are currently exploring.

Whitehouse spoke to the Evening Mail on the implications of the paper. “We find that deeply unpleasant, painful shared memories can strengthen ties rather than breaking them. This has relevance for policymakers, for example, fighters in Syria experiencing the horrors of a bombing campaign may be bound together by these traumatic events.”

Seshat’s data will be used to explore the full implications of the paper’s claims, using history to draw parallels to modern day conflicts.

“We find that deeply unpleasant, painful shared memories can strengthen ties rather than breaking them. This has relevance for policymakers, for example, fighters in Syria experiencing the horrors of a bombing campaign may be bound together by these traumatic events.”

Stopping air bombing would remove the seige mentality.

However, ISIS fighters can deliberately use the same techniques to strengthen their own bonds.

In fact, they already have been. The massacres, heritage destruction and other horrors they have committed are dysphoric rituals – that presumably its leaders forced their members to take part in – which would have created cohesion out of the dsyphoria. Once you have committed a war crime there is no going back.

The fight against ISIS that is creating for them a siege mentality merely adds on to what is already there. A truly interesting solution would be one that unpicks the ISIS complex propaganda system by which they apparently gain followers who do their leader’s every bidding.

Drop leaflets saying that the ISIS leaders are not Islamic. Emphasise that ISIS doesn’t attack Israel and could be used by Israel to justify an invasion of Syria at some future time, or at least strengthen their hold on the Golan Heights where there is oil. Emphasise the ISIS leaders/commanders are frequently not Syrian.

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